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Toronto Maple Leafs: Return to playoffs would be first-time experience for these kids

Three fathers of young hockey-playing Maple Leafs fans — born on May 4, 2004, the last Leafs’ playoff game — look forward to sharing post-season experience with their kids.

From left, Doug Morgan and his daughter Riley; Andrew Kim and his son Mattias, and Sandy Stephens and his son Jeremy are pumped by the prospect of their beloved Maple Leafs playing playoff hockey for the first time since these three kids were born: May 4, 2004. (Vince Talotta / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Doug Morgan’s love for the team he’d grown up cheering for waned after the Maple Leafs failed to reach the finals in 1993.

But he’ll never forget that push to the Stanley Cup, the heroic efforts of Doug Gilmour, the horns blaring up and down Yonge St., the way Toronto came to life.

Morgan’s daughter Riley has never experienced the joys of playoff hockey wins or the bitterness of losing. She was born on May 4, 2004, the day of the Leafs’ last playoff game, a 3-2 overtime loss to the Philadelphia Flyers that knocked the team out of the first round.

Doug Morgan didn’t see that game either.

“We had other priorities,” he said.

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He heard the Leafs lost the next day from a friend.

Playoffs or no playoffs, at age 8, Riley has become a diehard Leafs fan. Instead of cartoons, her dad comes downstairs on the weekends to find her watching Maple Leafs highlights. And her love of the boys in blue has brought daddy Doug Morgan back to the Leafs as well.

“It’s so cool,” she says of watching her Leafs play.

Like Riley, fellow 8-year-olds Jeremy Stephens and Mattias Kim have also never experienced Leaf playoff thrills. They, too, were born on May 4, 2004.

All three kids play hockey, each in their first year of “rep,” and all three are chatting away under a table at the Air Canada Centre. All three are at a Maple Leafs game after the Star bought them tickets and brought them together.

The kids have never met before but are bonding over the Leafs, giggling under the table about seeing their heroes up close while their dads discuss their hometown club topside.

The kids already know how to talk like Leafs fans: this year, it’s going to be different, they say. This year, the Leafs are going to make the playoffs. This year, they’ll learn what their dads mean by “playoff hockey is different.”

“I could hear the horns on Yonge St. from miles away,” said Morgan, rustling his daughter’s hair before Thursday’s game featuring the Leafs against the New York Islanders.

The hope was for Toronto to clinch a playoff spot on Thursday night against the Isles, but the Leafs lost. Still, if Toronto gets just two more wins, the team is in for sure, and if some other clubs lose enough, the Leafs won’t even have to win another.

The odds have never looked better.

But you don’t need to tell that to these three kids. Instead, they will tell you.

Riley — who turns to her dad and asks who Doug Gilmour is — has faith, especially in Tyler Bozak, her favourite player.

Bozak did, after all, tap her hand on the way onto the ice Thursday as the kids crowded around the entrance where the Leafs charge onto the ice.

“Of course they’re going to win the Stanley Cup,” she exclaims, laughing with Jeremy and Mattias.

“They look so big in person,” says Mattias. “So much bigger than on TV.”

“Yeah,” says Jeremy. “But seeing the dressing room was awesome, that was sweet.”

Riley chimes in that having some pucks tossed over the glass to them was by far the “coolest” part, and Jeremy nods, adding the Leafs are “1,000” per cent going to win the Cup.

Above the table, their fathers are remembering the “good old days.”

Andrew Kim remembers skipping school as a teen to get Darryl Sittler’s autograph; Sandy Stephens remembers watching the Leafs at his cottage with his dad, and Doug Morgan recalls Gilmour’s double-overtime, wraparound goal against St. Louis in 1993.

“About this time, I’d usually be a Jays fan,” says Kim. “But now I can watch playoff hockey with Mattias.”

Kim builds a rink in his backyard every year for his son, and when Mattias is out there skating he has yet to pretend to be a Leaf. It’s usually Wayne Gretzky or Sidney Crosby instead of Phil Kessel or Nazem Kadri.

Kim thinks that’s because the Leafs haven’t made the playoffs in Mattias’s lifetime. But if the Leafs make a push this year, Kim has a feeling Mattias may be pretending to be Joffrey Lupul — his favourite Leaf — next winter.

“Playoffs are different, they are,” says Stephens.

No one argues.

Stephens says his son Jeremy, in the playoffs right now for his hockey team, has been bugging him about something recently: he doesn’t want him to shave his beard.

“I grew it for his playoff run, but now he wants me to keep it for the Leafs’ run,” laughs Stephens. “It’s itchy, though. But I’m not sure I can say no.”

“I got a feeling the Leafs are going to go all the way this year,” says Morgan. “All the pieces are lining up, right, Riley?”

“Yeah!” she says, crawling out from under the table. Her two new Leafs friends follow and the three of them draw an imaginary line along the floor.

“One, two, three . . . Go Leafs Go!” they all yell as they take off, racing toward glory just as the Leafs will try and do this post-season.

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